Tailoring Our Care to Meet Your Needs

               When you are in the care of a nurse, he or she will take the time to learn about your disorder and treat you appropriately. If they know little about your past history they will ask you to briefly explain anything you want them to know then they will research it on their own to make sure you receive the best care for your situation. 

               A nurse will often look for information on the Internet by way of the facility’s medical search engines. I have seen a number of websites (for regular folk that don’t have access to the fancy stuff) that are really informative with info for nurses to care for their pancreatic cancer patients. One of them is Nurse Labs. This site lists many possible nursing diagnoses for this disease, no matter the stage. A nursing diagnosis is like a plan of action for a nurse. They include potential problems, risk factors, interventions to prevent or aid issues, goal for the patient to meet and education related to the problem. These diagnoses can change at any time as they evolve with how the patient is feeling, behaving, moving, or acting. 

               The diagnoses are written in a specific way and may include items such as –

               (These come directly from NurseLabs.com)

• Acute pain related to (r/t) obstruction of pancreatic, biliary ducts as evidenced by (AEB) reports of 9/10 pain in left upper quadrant (LUQ).

• Risk for deficient fluid volume r/t excessive losses from vomiting (“risk for” will not have “AEB” because there is only a risk of it happening, there is not yet evidence of it happening).

• Imbalanced nutrition r/t loss of digestive enzymes and insulin AEB aversion to eating, weight loss, poor muscle tone.

• Risk for infection r/t immunosuppression.

• Deficient knowledge r/t unfamiliarity with information resources AEB question and request for information.

               When one of these is chosen it is then written out to include many scenarios that relate to you specifically. There is a canned list of things to choose from so we need to go through the list and pick the items suited to your situation (we won’t pick pregnancy risks if you’re not pregnant, or if you’re a dude). Here is an example of a table for one nursing diagnosis.

Nursing Diagnosis	Acute pain r/t obstruction of pancreatic , biliary ducts AEB reports 9/10 pain in LUQ
Goal	Patient will follow prescribed therapeutic regimen Patient will demonstrate use of methods that provide relief
Nursing Intervention	Promote position of comfort on one side with knees flexed, sitting up and leaning forward. Administer analgesics in timely manner (smaller, more frequent doses). Prepare for surgical intervention if indicated.
Evaluation	Patient has reported 3/10 pain 30 minutes after receiving analgesics. Provider has changed the analgesia order to be smaller doses more frequently.